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Ping the World

Friday, March 17, 2006

A response to Wednesday's post about this blog's stats got me thinking about how blog promotion strategies differ from mainstream web site promotion, and how the very nature of blogs means you have to adjust your thinking to build traffic and encourage repeat visits.

Blogs differ from mainstream web sites in several key ways. These offer both advantages and challenges in terms of traffic generation. This post will act as a landing page from which to explore this topic. I will be building links below as I develop each of these ideas, so please check back often.

Attracting Site Visitors

Push content out proactively with RSS feeds and ping services. This ability to summon search engines to come crawl you gives blogs a huge advantage.

Get listed in the key blog directories. There are more of these every day, and listings are almost always free.

Consider blog traffic exchanges, which generate traffic to your blog based on the time you spend surfing other people's blogs.

Get blog-rolled. Getting links from other people's blog rolls is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site and increase your search ranking.

Get stumbled upon, dugg, furled, and listed in every link popularity and social bookmarking site you can find — there's nothing better than a recommendation from fellow surfers

Use keywords strategically, to get your posts found in both conventional and blog search engines.

Tag content so people can find you by focusing on their area of interest.

Keeping Site Visitors

It's one thing to entice people to your site. It's another thing entirely to get them to stick around, let alone keep 'em coming back for more. This is especially true when visitors land randomly on a page through traffic exchange sites and stay only long enough to earn credits. The likelihood of these visitors finding content relevant to their needs is low. Visitors arriving through search engines stay longer, and explore the site, because they have located a document that meets their needs. Here are some ways to engage your less focused visitors:

Write well and write about what visitors are interested in.

Add graphics or photos to draw people into your copy. (I need to take my own advice!)

I will be fleshing these ideas out in several posts over the coming days, so please check back, or sign up for our feed to be sure not to miss anything. And if there are strategies that have worked for you, please take a moment to share them through this blog's comments feature.

5 comments:

Usefull stuff especially for a new blogger like me. Seems like I'll have to spend as much time publisising as I will writing though! BTW - I read in someone elses blog about registering to search engines - perhaps you could publish more about the feasablity of this?

Hi Jx,Yes, it's a major time commitment (more than I realized when I started this blog, if truth be told). Most of the search engines will find your posts, though retrieving old posts is a challenge after they leave the index page. For this reason, I submit every post to Google. It's the only search engine I bother with, for this blog.

jx - SEO is a good idea. There is a program called "Web CEO" you can download and use in a limited capacity for free, but it takes the work out of listing your site to alot of search engines. The catch is you will have to manually respond to some emails from sites to complete registration. Hope that helps..

Here is how it works:1. Sign up for Blogdemic. Add some html to your blog page.2. Your blog displays other blogs banner and sends clicks to other blogs.3. Other blogs displays your banner and sends clicks to your blog.4. Blogdemic retrieves your RSS feed several times an hour and creates your banner advertisements automatically.5. You can determine how often other blogs banner display on your blog vs your own advertising tag i.e. like Google Adsense. So you can make money and drive traffic to your blog at the same time!

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About Me

Professional writer, photographer, speaker, and educator, Pam Blackstone is published in a variety of print and electronic media. Her net search site, WebLens.org, is popular with casual surfers and serious researchers alike. Pam's professional site is at Shutterscribe and her digital art is at Fractallicious.